The Client Perspective: James Laws, WP Ninjas

By James Laws

We're excited to present to you the third in our series of guest blog posts. The idea? To let our clients tell you about their experiences working with Focus Lab. This time around, hear from James Laws of WP Ninjas. Working with them for branding was SO RAD. When they came back for UI work? We wept tears of joy. Hear the story from their side.

Outsourcing, Quite Possibly Your Business's Best Friend

As an entrepreneur it's easy to get stuck in the “I can do it all myself” mindset. You get an idea, build it, market it, sell it, and if you get really lucky, maybe you're moderately successful at it. That success can sometimes perpetuate that trend even further.

The secret that most successful entrepreneurs learn is that even if they can do something, they may not be the best person for that job. In these cases they start searching for professionals and partners who can take various areas of their business to new levels. That's exactly what happened for us when we started our journey to create a better brand for our product, Ninja Forms.

Finding the Right Partner

There is no shortage of great designers in the world, and if you’re willing to make an investment, most of them will work with you readily enough. The trick is in finding the one that is just the right fit for your company and your brand. When we started our journey, we wanted to find someone we trusted implicitly with our image.

We asked for referrals from others in our niche and someone suggested that we look around on Dribbble. This seemed like a weird approach, but I did a quick search on branding and started opening everything I liked in a new tab within my browser. After a short while I had a dozen tabs opened and it was time to see which companies and/or freelancers I was going to reach out to. That's when something quite amazing happened.

Every single tab I had opened with branding work I simply loved were all from the same company. Every single one!

What the Right Partner Will Provide

Our experience with Focus Lab was quite simply: perfect.

I was completely confident with the results they would achieve. Everything I had seen that they’d previously done was a homerun from my perspective. Had they simply done the job I thought I had hired them for, the project would have been a success. But the right partner will provide more than what you think you need.

From the very beginning, sometimes perhaps even unknowingly, the team at Focus Lab challenged us with bigger goals than a simple product brand. Through the process we began to discover who we were and what we wanted to be. What began as a product brand project (Ninja Forms) turned into a total company discovery process for us (from the top- WP Ninjas- down).

When all was said and done they provided us with the finished deliverables. On the surface, that included all the graphics and implementations to launch the new image of our brand. What we gained from this partnership was much more than that, however.

The right partner, in our case Focus Lab, will leave you better than they found you. Not only by completing the task you hired them for, but by causing you to question the boundaries of the task at hand. They will excite you to do better work yourself and challenge your preconceived limits. They will make you evermore hopeful at just how much you are capable of.

When you finally wise up and stop trying to do everything yourself, it is then time to find the right partner for the challenge you are facing. It may not be easy. It may take time, trial, and error. But when you find the right partner it will most definitely be worth it.